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Ubisoft has apparently stated that the upcoming sequel to Far Cry is set to hit Xbox 360, PS3, and PC at the same time sometime this fall. This the first indication of a release timeframe since the game was pushed into fiscal year 2008. Not much is known about the game still, except that it will be set in Africa and involve some incredible weather effects. However, Ubisoft has indicated that a demo for the game should be released at some point. Maybe we’ll see if this is more than just a fresh coat of paint then.Via Eurogamer

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As the release of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 approaches, gamers are left wondering whether it’s worth all the trouble of a huge download and an anti-hack update when hotfixes can be manually downloaded from the Windows site. ExtremeTech has done some testing and found answers that might surprise you.

There is a marked difference in the efficiency of the SP1 media fixes as compared to the hotfixes. File operations tests show hardly any difference between the two. Company of Heroes and World in Conflict performance tests show a a performance gap between the hotfix and SP1. Supreme Commander and Crysis performance tests are more unclear and even surprising.
Get the full details and make an informed decision on whether to upgrade on ExtremeTech.

The best of the released and unreleased mods of 2007 are featured on a video up on ModDB. The piece is well worth setting aside 21 minutes of your time for the best mods of the year. Most of the winners are based FPSs with a bit RTS thrown in.

The highlights of this years ModDB awards are Mechwarrior Living Legends (Crysis), Tremulous, Red Alert (Command and Conquer), Beyond the Red Line BSG (Freespace 2) and Empires (Half-Life 2). Check out the video for details on all these great pieces of work and more.

GDC may be over, but there’s still a few bits of information left to trickle out from the show. This video shot from the floor has a representative showing off some of the technology behind the upcoming Far Cry 2. It should come as no surprise that the people behind Crysis have some pretty impressive special effects behind their next title. The tech demo shows how the environment will constantly change realistically with the passage of time and the changing weather. They even have a system that allows for realistic tree growth, though that won’t be present in the final game. Now we just have to see if this game has the gameplay to back it up.

The first Crysis Mod SDK is out. This mod tool contains the necessary exporters, plug-ins, and also respective documentation to enable modders to export their custom content into the Sandbox2 Editor. Modders will also be able to create complete new levels and modifications.

This SDK includes sample assets and instructions as well as a few serious game assets. These high poly objects can be used as a reference for creating your own content. Full contents of the Crysis Mod SDK are listed after the break.

Read the full article

There’s no denying that Crysis is an absolute beauty; nothing comes close to matching the gorgeous visuals that CryEngine 2 – the technology behind Crysis – can produce. It’s exciting to know, then, that CryEngine 2 is going to be shown at this year’s GDC running on multiple platforms, including the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

There won’t be a public showing of this, but it’s exciting news nevertheless. While it likely isn’t going to be a straight port of the engine – it is, after all, built to last well into the future on hardware that you can’t find now – it would be great to see how hard it could push the power of the 360 and PS3.

Maybe a console version of Crysis isn’t so far fetched after all.

Read the official press release here.

If, like me, you are one of many PC gamers who were given a nice reality check to the awesomeness (or lack thereof) of your PC gaming hardware upon running Crysis, then you most likely have come to appreciate the value of a good tweak guide. Let’s face it, Crysis roundhouse kicks $600 video cards (and CPUs) like Chuck Norris in a movie extra abuse marathon. The visuals, as astounding as they may be, aren’t without their cost.

But what if your abilities fall outside the purview of a tech savvy PC gamer? Ok, let’s quit beating around the bush: What if you are simply a PC noob? Even if editing configuration files with notepad doesn’t typically scare you, trying to figure out what those hundreds of in-game CVARs and values represent can test even the most hardcore types of gamers. As handy as tools such as Koroush Ghazi’s excellent Crysis Tweak Guide may be, trying to decipher all that gobbledygook probably makes your head spin. Enter The Noobs Guide to Optimizing Crysis.

GameCritics have attempted to tackle what many thought impossible: teaching the humble how to get the most out of his or her hardware and Crysis. And they do so in less than 1700 words - something I’m sure many of our readers can appreciate.

While the GameCritics tweak guide is certainly easy to follow, it only represents one of a myriad of ways towards Crysis performance improvement. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve found the holy grail of Crysis settings perfection here. As with most PC game tweak guides, your mileage may vary. If anything, GameCritic’s guide is a good foundation for anyone, even the macho tech savvy, to build upon. Certainly worth a read if you own Crysis.

[Edit: Oh yeah, and if you’re all patched up, be sure to share your benchmark results (before & after).]

Via GameCritics

At long last, EA have finally released a patch for Crysis. Most of the changes seems to point towards DX9 & DX10 optimizations.

As usual, you can get the 139 MB patch from the FileFront link provided below. A complete list of changes are provided after the break.

Download Crysis v1.1 Patch @ FileFront [139 MB]

Read the full article

We all know that Crysis has some amazing graphics. As I can personally attest, the game does seem to bring out the graphics-whore in the lot of us. While playing some of the more frenetic levels in Crysis (i.e. carrier), I dare say I spared little time to stop and zoom in on those ugly (or not-so-ugly) kissers. So what could I possibly have missed?

The fellas over at PCGamesHardware.de did take time to stop and photograph those largely overlooked mugs in the game. In a recent two-part analysis, PCGamesHardware.de examines the facial details of various in-game characters in Crysis. There’s not a whole lot of German verbiage, so a translator is not exactly required. You’re welcome to bring your “Graphics=Meh.” attitude though. The guy pictured above could really care less.

Gotta love the stubble.

Via PCGamesHardware.de

First off, neither Crytek nor EA have (yet) officially stated that a 360 version (or PS3 for that matter) of Crysis is being developed. In fact, the closest hint to such a merger we’ve been alluded to was given here. Either way, I think it would be presumptuous to pass off CryENGINE2 as being PC only. I’d almost bet that Crytek is diligently working (as we speak) at getting some form of the engine working on the 360 and PS3 (Crysis isn’t going to be the only game using the engine). Only time will tell if we will ever see Crysis making it onto the consoles. So until then, we speculate.

With that said, it’s all fun and games to speculate such things. Which is why one forum goer over at the inCrysis forums decided to share a recent find with the Crysis community there. It seems an electronic store (link here) over in Austria has among its various listings (which I preserved above) of Crysis for PC a couple of listings of Crysis for the Xbox 360. The most interesting detail to note here is the release date given for those: November 20, 2008. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of this particular online retailer much less any clue to their reputation. If it’s truly a leak of some kind, then it’s one that deserves some refuting.

Then again, November is still quite a ways off.

Via inCrysis Forums

While browsing the inCrysis forums, I discovered this little gem of a short composed by one of its forum goers. The author (going by the username of 2 Bad) was originally going to scrap the idea completely after becoming thoroughly frustrated with the Sandbox 2 editor. I think perseverance has paid off, as the results speak for themselves.

Even though the author claims this is not his first attempt at a machinima, it does seem as if this is the first attempt by anyone at a Crysis machinima. In the recent past, we’ve seen Crymod’ers exploiting CryEngine2’s physics to imitate tornado effects. Some Crymod’ers are on the road to recreating the perfect nuke. With the Crymod community kicking into full gear, and the Sandbox 2 Editor’s potential yet to be exploited, we will certainly be looking forward to some interesting user made videos/films in the days to come.

Editor’s note: The above browser embedded clip has been auto-transcoded and simply does not do the film justice visually or audibly. I highly recommend downloading the full 720p HD version (from the link above or below). For now, the author has provided the HD version encoded in DivX6. Unless you have a 7+ year old PC, you should be able to play it fine.

If you enjoyed this film short as much as I did, please drop a comment either here or the originating thread over at inCrysis (you’ll need to register to comment there). The artists that come up with these videos do so on account of their own free time. Any amount of encouragement or useful feedback ensures we’ll see more of this creativity along the way.

Download ‘Trauma - A Crysis Machinima’ HD (DivX6) [202 MB]

Even if the anticipated patch didn’t quite make the Christmas list, Crytek has possibly saved face by stuffing a map pack into our stockings. Words spoken by the wise men themselves:

Now that Christmas is here and we are seeing another year coming to its end it is time for our beloved Crytek Christmas message. It has probably been the most exciting year since FarCry has been shipped. Not only that we relaunched our Crymod Modding Portal for our new blockbuster FPS, we also finished Crysis which has been in development for about four years.

On behalf of the whole Crytek development studios in Frankfurt, Kiev and Budapest and the entire Crytek Staff we wish the whole community Maximum Christmas and a Happy New Year 2008!

The map pack is also known as the Crysis Tournament Map Pack. There’s a good chance some of these maps will end up being used in the recently announced inCrysis Nvidia Crysis League. The map pack contains three PowerStruggle maps and two InstantAction maps. Pretty sweet of Crytek giving these freebies out so soon. You can nab the entire pack from the download link below.

Download Crysis Tournament Map Pack @ FileFront

Via Crymod

Over the past few weeks PC gamers have been waiting with much anticipation towards a Crysis patch offering much needed bug fixes, improved SLI support, and possible quad core support. Even Nvidia have pre-emptively released beta drivers hinting said patch congruency. Well, it looks like Crytek have come forward to break the bad news to all. Indeed, as many feared, there will be no Crysis patch released this year (not that there’s much year left to speak of).

While I’m sure a vast majority of gamers out there will not be treating such news as holiday devastation, there will undoubtedly be those handful of hardcore gamers that will be shaking fists in anger. In what I would observe as a vain attempt to cushion the blow, Crytek did finally share with the community a roadmap of updates scheduled for early 2008. Unfortunately, it seems as if quad core support didn’t make such list. For those gamers investing in a quad core cpu (especially the newly released Intel QX9650) specifically for Crysis, you may now proceed to bang head on desk. Although I can’t exactly praise any purchase of a quad core cpu as a wise gaming investment (at this time), I will agree to some extent that a game as lauded as Crysis as being the showcase benchmark for next-gen 3D technology should be offering such support. Then again, we are talking about a very small user base here.

Regardless, here’s hoping that the folks over at Crytek are able to enjoy their holiday break (dodge that hate mail, guys). I’m sure you Cryfolk are working hard on shaping that patch up into a worthy release. With a premium title such as Crysis, we gamers expect nothing less than the best.

As usual, you can peruse Crytek’s New Year’s resolutions after the break.

Read the full article

It looks like the guys over at inCrysis have teamed up with Nvidia to give gamers a chance to win some stuff:

inCrysis - the worlds #1 fan site for the game Crysis and NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the world leader in visual computing technologies, are pleased to announce the inCrysis/NVIDIA Crysis League with $15,000 in mind-blowing prizes! Click here for the details!

According the announcement, the league will commence early January 2008 and operate across three geographical locations: North America, Europe, & Australia. Details on the match setup are given:

The league will feature matches between teams of six players each on the Power Struggle mode — a unique mode all about team play and tactics with high-tech weaponry including tactical nukes and alien technology. Following a series of elimination matches, four teams will battle it out for the ultimate victory.

Applications for the league are to be done over at the incrysisleague.com website. An important note is that applications are taken on a per-team basis. This means you cannot apply as an individual. So grab five of your buddies first before even attempting that. If you can’t seem to find enough friends with beastly machines fast enough to run Crysis, you may try your luck at posting in the forums. Registrations close by December 31st, 2007.

As a bonus, I’ve put up a HiDef version of the official Crysis Launch Trailer above. In typical fashion, you can either watch it as a wimpy scaled down embedded version above or click the link directly below that to download its full HD glory (recommended).

Now where’s that patch?

Via inCrysis

That title might even be misleading – underperforming is practically an understatement for the number that Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 put up last month. While neither game did have a full month on store shelves, both put up abysmal numbers.

According to the NPD, Crysis sold only 86,633 units, while Unreal Tournament 3 did 33,995. While you can immediately attribute Crysis’ poor sales to its insane system requirements, seeing UT3 do so poorly is shocking; it’s one of the most storied PC FPS series ever.

While it is a crowded market, as Next Gen points out, it still makes you wonder how much longer publishers will be able to go with the PC version of a game as the leading SKU – or in Crysis’ case, the only SKU.

What exactly would compel a public figure to say something like this, I don’t know; Nick Button-Brown, the director of business development for EA Partners, has quite bluntly said that European developers are more creative than their American counterparts who are only interested in money.

“There’s more creativity in Europe than there is in America,” said Button-Brown. “The Americans are much more refined in their processes, it’s all about the money. There are less chances taken and there is more money being thrown at developers in the US.”

“Taking less chances means there’s less failures, but I can’t see the US having ever come up with Grand Theft Auto. There are a lot of really good European developers and they all bring slightly different things and there are big cultural differences as well, that they are willing to exploit,” he added.

“So many developers are multinational. Go to Crytek and they have 27 national languages there. And that’s interesting because they are bringing in so many different areas and ideas to the studio, particularly with the influx of Eastern Europe – you’re getting such a wide range of experiences to pick from.

“We like that multiculturalism. What we’re getting now are more worldwide titles. We used to have the German industry that produced German titles, the UK would deliver tongue-in-cheek games, but now it’s become much more globalised and what we are seeing is European titles that can sell worldwide,” he continued.

It’s difficult to know exactly what he was getting at, if anything, but this seems like it’ll accomplish nothing more than irking a few American developers.

via GamesIndustry.biz

I don’t really expect Time Magazine to be an expert on videogames (or, as they would argue, “video games”), but if you’re going to publish a list of the top 10 games of the year, you better either know what you’re talking about, or be David Letterman. I’d argue Time’s top 10 list indicates neither of those.

The list, which can be seen here, is a part of Time’s “50 Top 10 Lists of 2007,” which includes things like Top 10 Worst Biz Deals, Top 10 Gadgets, and Top 10 Websites (none of which I had ever even heard of).

The list starts off with Halo 3 as the number one game, and proceeds to mention games like BioShock, The Orange Box, Mario Galaxy and, most curiously to me, Ace Combat 6 and Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

I almost don’t even know where to begin, except to cite a few things: there are no PS3 or PC games on the list (Crysis, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, Uncharted and Ratchet all instantly come to mind as better candidates than either Ace Combat or Zelda)… and, well, actually I think that’s enough to raise an eyebrow.

Then again, lists like this are subjective… but doesn’t it make sense to have more than one author collaborate on something like this – especially when it’s for a major publication like Time?

The Crysis engine is good for a lot of things; playing Crysis for instance. Or, as one industrious person discovered, you can create a video of a moving sculpture out of thousands of in-game boxes and set it to “Pretty Pet” by Aberdeen City. The creator of this video has made a point though that the code at the beginning does not improve the in-game physics, but rather improves the capture rate for making video like this one; so don’t expect to solve any frame rate issues this easily. Still, it’s a pretty awesome video, almost soothing really. It seems to tell the story of a man and his top hat being crumbled by a truck. There’s some existential philosophy in there somewhere.

For some inexplicable reason, Crytek opted to make the ‘Very High’ graphic settings a DX10-only feature. It would be understandable if DX10 were required, but they aren’t – ExtremeTech has found a simple method for allowing people without Vista or a DX10 card to use those high-end settings.

There’s some simple editing you’ll need to do in a certain configuration file; novices shouldn’t be driven away, although, chances are, your computer won’t be able to run the game with these settings.

In addition to publishing this short how-to, ExtremeTech went into the differences between the two versions of the game and posted some disappointing benchmarks to show just how badly Crysis is beating even the highest of high-end computers into the ground.

Read the full story here.

This may not be the weirdest PC mod ever, but it certainly wins in the awesome department. Someone over at the Crysis forums just got a brand spankin’ new gaming machine modeled after the recently released game. The lucky owner, going by “xxstalker24xx,” apparently won this bad boy in a recent competition. Aside from the decked out case, the computer also has these specs:

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 3.00GHz
Albatron GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB
Corsair TwinCM2X 4X1GB
SB X-Fi
2x Raptor X 150gb ( EXTREMELY FAST )
DVD - ROM

Man, that’s pretty sweet. I was worried for a second that they’d send him a Crysis-mod PC that couldn’t actually run Crysis. Oh, the irony that would have been.

Via inCrysis