Update: Russian website Mad Fanboy has some new, exclusive details on Crysis 3, as well as a fancy screenshot – apparently, the game, which apparently will have “the best sandbox in the FPS market“, will be released for PC, X360 and PS3 in Spring of 2013, taking place in a wrecked New York that has been overgrown with vegetation and has nearly transformed into a jungle. Meanwhile, EA has told The Verge that more information on Crysis 3 will be released on the 16th of April. Stay tuned!
Crytek have been quite busy lately. Best known as the creators of two of the biggest (and prettiest) ego-shooters ever made, Far Cry and Crysis, they’ve been striving to diversify within these past twelve months. They don’t want to be known as a one or two-trick-pony, and that’s understandable. In between developing a free-to-play multiplayer FPS targeted towards Asian markets, called Warface; working on THQ’s Homefront 2, which is targeted for release in 2014; rumors that they have Crytek UK working on a TimeSplitters 4; as well as a few other projects – we can clearly see that these guys are most certainly not sleeping on the job.
But it would seem they haven’t forgotten about what may be their flagship series. Just these past couple of days, EA accidentally released game listings for Crysis 3 on their digital distribution platform, Origin. They also left us this super-fancy banner logo thing:
The game listings in question reveal that the game will be released for both the PC and XBox 360. A PlayStation 3 listing was absent, but surely EA hasn’t forgotten about Sony’s black behemoth. As usual, pre-ordering will get you the Limited Edition, which appears to also include some in-game goodies, as it will be available through a direct download (it remains unknown if we’ll see a fancy collector’s edition as we did for previous Crysis installments). The banner, of course, shows a Nanosuit wearer wielding a compound bow, arrow included, somewhere in a wrecked cityscape. Which city would that be? We don’t know yet, but despite bearing a vague resemblance to New York City, it’s a safe bet that we won’t be returning to the Big Apple. A holographic world map shown at the end of Crysis 2 revealed that the Ceph alien species had colonies under London, Moscow, Cairo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, and Honolulu, so it’d probably be one of those.
In addition, Swedish gaming magazine Game Reactor has also teased a world-exclusive reveal in next week’s issue #49. The cover for that issue features the same wrecked cityscape from the Origin banner, and has the trademark Nanosuit hexagonal pattern shown in the top-left corner. And last month, Crytek’s general manager, Nick Button-Brown told CVG that Crytek would reveal a “spectacular” and “absolutely fantastic” PC/console project some time… this month. And one month earlier than that, in February, a video director job listing from EA revealed that the big publisher was tackling a new project with Crytek – EA having served as publisher for every single Crysis title, and staying optimistic regarding the production of a Crysis 3, 4, and 5 together with Crytek.
So as you can see, the possibility that we will see a Crysis 3 announcement very soon is actually quite high. That said, an actual release date would be quite far off – mid-to-late 2013, perhaps, if not later. While new Crysis releases typically serve as introductions to brand new iterations of the CryEngine, it is unknown if Crysis 3 will introduce us to a CryEngine 4. Still, it will almost surely be an absolute graphical beast, and hopefully fan reactions towards Crysis 2’s brand of linearized, simplified gameplay have reminded Crytek that the roots of the Crysis franchise lie in open-ended, non-linear gameplay and exploration.
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