Posts Tagged ‘Crytek’

Video game tourism alert: Warface is off to Pripyat

Crytek’s free-to-play face-shooter Warface [official site] is off to the city of Pripyat within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone later this year. Is Warface (WARFACE WARFACE WARFACE etc.) any good? Dunno. Am I keen to see this? Oh yes. I always enjoy video games travelling to that spooky abandoned land, from Call of Duty 4’s stealthy visit to the joys of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. Video game tourism is challenging when enemies are trying to shoot your face off, sure, but that’s part of the satisfaction. Would a view from a mountaintop be the same without a climb? Doesn’t a hike make the ruins you reach all the more delightful? Read the rest of this entry »

Crytek’s monsterhunt FPS Hunt: Showdown looks neat

The first gameplay video of Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown has arrived and makes the monster-hunting multiplayer FPS look a lot more interesting than expected. I was disappointed when Crytek revealed that they’d turned the cooperative Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age into the competitive Hunt: Showdown [official site] and teased the change with a video of some cowboys shooting some other cowboys. Turns out, it’s not nearly as rubbo as suggested. Showdown will see five two-person teams roaming around big monster-filled levels, trying to find and kill a boss monster with a bounty on its head – while making sure they live to claim it. Watch: Read the rest of this entry »

Crytek’s co-op Hunt: Horrors Of The Gilded Age reborn PvP as Hunt: Showdown

Given Crytek’s years of terrible financial trouble and their focus on virtual reality games, I’m surprised by news that they are still working on Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age. Well. They sort of are. What was a cooperative third-person action game about monster hunters in the 1800s, which sounded a bit ‘Left 4 Dead meets Van Helsing’, is now a competitive game named Hunt: Showdown [official site]. It still has revolvers and big cowboy hats but I did quite like the sound of the co-op Hunt. Read the rest of this entry »

Sega buys Crytek Black Sea for Creative Assembly

Sega have bought Crytek Black Sea, one of the studios the financially-troubled Crytek was closing, and given it to Creative Assembly. Now that’s romance. Creative Assembly are, of course, the gang best known for the Total War games and Alien: Isolation, while Crytek Black Sea (formerly Black Sea Studios) were behind real-time strategy games Knight of Honor and WorldShift and MOBA Arena of Fate. Now they’re pals, working on mysterious unannounced games, and known as Creative Assembly Sofia. Read the rest of this entry »

Crytek’s VR dinoland Robinson coming to PC after all

Given that the term “exclusively” in video games often has an invisble “until a deal we can’t tell you about expires” attached (if you’re curious: this is visible only by the light of a blue moon), it’s probably not a surprise that Crytek’s PlayStation VR exclusive dinosaur adventure Robinson: The Journey [official site] is now headed for a PC version. Yup, Crytek may be closing several studios and laying off staff but they’re not done just yet. In January, the cybergoggle dinoventure will hit PC for Oculus Rift goggs. Read the rest of this entry »

Crytek closes five studios after reportedly failing to pay workers

Crytek is closing down five of its offices around the world after financial trouble has reportedly left many of its workers unpaid for months. Studios in Frankfurt and Kiev are staying open, the developers said in a classically verbose press release, but all other studios are being shut down, including offices in Seoul, Sofia, Shanghai, Istanbul and Budapest. “Management has put plans into action to secure jobs and to ensure a smooth transition and stable future,” said the notice. Translation: a large number of people are losing their jobs.
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RPS Feature "like a greatest hits of Cryengine games"

Wot I Think: Crytek’s VR Game The Climb

Three fallacies I’m occasionally guilty of believing:

1) The Oculus Rift does not involve any of the physicality of the HTC Vive
2) VR gaming is riding a cart to minigame hell
3) There’s a ceiling on how good VR games can look

Crytek’s beautiful and involving Oculus Rift game The Climb [official site] is a pretty good riposte to all of the above.
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RPS Feature Back to the future

A Bright Future: The Long Road To TimeSplitters Rewind

For some, TimeSplitters ranks with GoldenEye as one of the great multiplayer FPS games. To be more precise, it’s one of the great multiplayer FPS games that never made it to PC. Created by Free Radical Design, a studio made up primarily of ex-Rare employees, the original TimeSplitters was a PS2 launch title. Two sequels followed but sales of the third game weren’t strong enough for a fourth title to go into production.

For years now, a team of part-time developers have been working to bring the series back to life, on PC, as a free project using CryEngine 3, and assets from the originals, with the permission of IP holders Crytek. This is the story of TimeSplitters Rewind.

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RPS Feature Onwards and upwards

Virtual Reality Summit: Gloves On With The Climb

There’s always gonna be another mountain
I’m always gonna wanna make it move
Always gonna be an uphill battle
Sometimes I’m gonna have to lose
Ain’t about how fast I get there
Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side
It’s the climb – Miley Cyrus, 2009

One of the most promising VR experiences I had at GDC came courtesy of Crytek’s rock climbing Oculus Rift project, The Climb [official site].

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Scale The Alps In The Climb’s New VR Trailer

Over the last year or so, you might’ve spotted Crytek’s lovely Back to Dinosaur Island VR demos. The Climb [official site] is the Crysis devs’ latest project – a virtual reality climbing simulator that charges players with scaling treacherous cliff faces in idyllic locales scattered across the world. The latest trailer visits the Alps.

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Crytek VR Demo Puts More Dinosaurs In Your Eyes

Time travel is dangerous, we all know – look at what happens to Doctor When’s pals. That’s why the burgeoning time travel industry’s initial lineup of consumer products focuses on transporting only small parts of the body back in time. For £400, you can buy a pair of timegloves to touch 1682. Or for £500 you can transport your eyes in time and space, sending them to other eras and worlds. Crysis devs Crytek have a particular interest in sending eyes to see dinosaurs, and today they’ve released another bit of software letting people who own Rift timegoggles see some hoverdinos.

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Crytek’s Dinosaur Island VR Demo Now Dinoloadable

After some foolish experiments in the ’90s left dozens of people dead, scientists have mostly stopped trying to resurrect dinosaurs. It’s fine, don’t worry, now dinofans are only resurrecting them electron-sized within the secure confines of computers. Look at Crytek and their Back to Dinosaur Island, a tech demo with a dino nest safely inside y- wait, what? You have to put on virtual reality goggles and get shrunk down and travel inside your PC to confront the dinosaurs? Reader dear, do not do this – it is not safe.

Crytek today released the tech demo for all to nab through Steam, eight months after first showing it. Do not download it and enter with your cybergoggles. It cannot be safe.

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Crytek’s Robinson: The Journey Not Coming To PC

I had something jolly clever and awfully funny to say about the first trailer for Crytek’s virtual reality dinogame Robinson: The Journey [official site], and it was great and you would’ve loved it. Those Crysis folks never actually confirmed a PC version, though, we’d just assumed. So yesterday they announced it’ll be a PlayStation 4 exclusive for PlayStation VR goggles, and that’s us out. That’s disappointing, both because we won’t get fancy dinosaurs and because, you guys, that post would’ve been so good.

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RPS Feature

Have You Played… Crysis

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

When later entries in a series go wrong, the disappointment tends not to blight the original people liked so much. Unfortunately Crysis [official site] couldn’t maintain the things people liked about it for even its own running time. Yeah, the aliens were a bit guff, but there was so much in Crysis to like from its open stealth-action beginnings to its bombastic finale.

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TUXFACE: CryEngine Adds Linux Support

The mythical ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’ never arrived as explosively as many predicted (surprise surprise) but the open-source operating system (don’t even start, pedants – it’s been a long week and I will tear your windpipe out with my own gnarled hands) has steadily become a fairly attractive alternative to Windows. Games were always a big problem, but look at us today: most major game engines run on Linux, and Valve have made a dedicated gaming OS out of it.

You can now add CryEngine to your list of Linux Game Things, as Linux support arrived in its latest update. Crytek also added native Oculus Rift support.

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Crytek’s VR Walking Simulator – Robinson: The Journey

While we here at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have been ardent admirers of walking simulators for years, the mainstream video games industry is only now starting to cotton on to their wonders – and I suspect that’s mostly because expensive cybergoggles somehow make it ‘cooler’. While video games are still searching for our Citizen Kane (searching so desperately! crying ourselves to sleep over this hackneyed metaphor!), we might have found our Avatar.

Crysis folks Crytek today announced Robinson: The Journey [official site], a virtual reality game about exploring a lush alien planet and discovering its odd wildlife. It sounds like a walking simulator to me. I wonder if their recent Dinosaur Island VR demo is related.

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Watch Crytek’s Back To Dinosaur Island VR Demo

At this year’s GDC, Crytek demonstrated new features of the updated CryEngine. One of their demos was Back To Dinosaur Island, a VR demo designed for use with the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay prototype. The demo was playable – as much as it’s playable – on the show floor during GDC, but on the off chance that you weren’t there or couldn’t strap a VR helmet to your face, the below might be of interest. It’s a supposed direct feed video of the demo in action, with lots of shiny dinosaur action.

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RPS Feature Maximum Nostalgia

Campaign For A Better Memory Of Crysis 1

There’s an open stretch of grass between me and the thin exterior wall of a small island village. The place is crawling with enemy troops, who move along the dirt roads and populate the ramshackle buildings in groups of two or three. Defensive turrets would already be firing at me if I my nanosuit wasn’t keeping me invisible, the energy bar barely moving for as long as I remain still.

So I start to run.

You want Advanced Warfare? Crysis did that seven years ago.

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The Gothic Revival: Off The Map

The Off The Map competition is my favourite part of GameCity. Admittedly, I might enjoy the actual event if I ever managed to drag my self to Nottingham while it was happening, but the delights that Off The Map produces would still be fairly high in the rankings. The competition “challenges higher education students based in the UK to create gaming software inspired by the British Library’s collections.” CryEngine is the weapon of choice. This year, the library’s collection of gothic literature was the focus. No, not the Robert Smith/The Crow slash fiction you left tucked between the pages of Fifty Shades of Grey – we’re talking sunken abbeys, old Poe-face himself and Whitby.

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RPS Feature Mostly armless

Wot I Think: Ryse – Son Of Rome

They're all raising their one remaining arm

Having debuted as an Xbox One exclusive, Ryse has now decided to be an ex-exclusive and is out on PC today. My memories of its reception on Xbox were fairly dim – shiny in that Crytek way but with a short campaign and repetitive combat – and I went in having never even seen the classical carnage running outside of a trailer. Here’s wot I think.

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