Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.

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Here at RPS, we like to have a little fun every once in a while, but it’s time for real talk: Warface is no laughing matter. It afflicts several billion people per day, and chronic Warface has stumped even the techno-magic of modern medicine for years. Recently, it took Alec from us. Now he just sits in a corner all day, banging his head against the wall and mumbling about how he “must forever live in the shadow of his own Sistine Chapel.” And well, you’ve seen what it does to RPS comment threads. Really, it’s a misnomer: Warface is actually a disease of the mind. An apparition of the soul. Friends don’t let friends face Warface face war war war face far wace wa rface w arfac e.

W… who am I? I’ve suddenly forgotten everything about myself. Oh, but I do have this note saying Warface is now in closed beta. Seems innocent enough.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.

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