Free trial of Crysis Wars until December 28
Free trial of Crysis Wars, first-person shooter and playable online, has been announced by Crytek. Cryitek is offering this trial till December 28. This initiative of free trial was conceived by EA and Crytek combined for the Christmas, which will allow players to play online multiplayer section of Crysis Warhead.
Players can avail this facility by downloading from the official site of MyCrysis and then register there for getting the code.
The Crysis Wars features 3 different modes of play. They are InstantAction, TeamInstantAction and PowerStruggle. In total there are twenty-one maps ranging from small to huge territories.
The Holiday Map Pack, which is the new one, has 2 new maps supporting the multiplayer mode. Savanna is the first one and it covers the Savanna territories that is near to the Victoria Falls. At this location the American army is being attacked by the North Korean armies. This location is ideal for heavy vehicles.
Frost is the second map. It is little smaller and is of Trondheim region, which is near to few search sites about aliens.
Not just me that’s upset about aliens in Warhead…
So I submitted yesterdays new trailer to reddit, in the comments area I expressed my disappointment with the fact Crytek put MORE aliens into the game even after the community made it perfectly clear we didn’t want more aliens.
I just don’t understand how you can develop a game for a specific group of people and totally ignore what they are saying. It’s the same situation with the upcoming Call of Duty game which is being based on WWII even after everyone and their mother wanted another Modern Warfare game. Then to top it off, when Crysis sales are “disappointing”, they blame it on piracy. Piracy IS NOT the problem, the problem was bad game play, period. Amazing graphics only get you so far.
You wanna know what would be an amazing success? A game like BF2 or COD4 running on the cry engine.
But seriously guys, come on with this crap already. We don’t want to fight aliens, what’s so damn hard to understand? I’d rather fight giant lizards and spiders than aliens. If you’re going to try and force your users to fight aliens, why not ATLEAST try and make them organic looking? I mean, the aliens you put in don’t even look alive, they look like F’ing robots.
Whatever, don’t go crying about piracy if Warhead doesn’t meet your sales expectations.
If you would like to see the other comments on this, the thread is here.
Brand new gameplay trailers for Crysis Warhead!
So Crysis has put out a new trailer, and it’s actually of gameplay this time instead of just some stupid mini-movie. The driving gameplay redefined looks improved in my opinion, I remember driving in the first Crysis was really hard and awkward.
Another thing I noticed when watching this trailer is that at about the :40 second mark, the machine running the game starts to lag and get choppy when the battle intensifies. Crytek already said Warhead will be able to run on mid-level PC’s, so it would be interesting to know what kind of machine was running this. In all fairness, the lag could have very well been caused by FRAPS or whatever game cam they were using. I usually don’t have that problem when using FRAPS, but who knows.
To watch the HD trailers, click on the Crysis Warhead Videos tab.
Crysis Warhead Details Emerge; Success May Lead to Crysis 2, DX10 Not Required for High-end Effects
New details about Crytek’s PC shooter follow-up Crysis Warhead have surfaced in monthly gaming magazine PC Gamer, reported by Czech gaming site Tiscali Games.
According to the preview, the possibility of a Crysis 2 relies heavily on Crysis Warhead’s performance at the market. While the title isn’t necessarily a true sequel, the developers stressed that Warhead is a completely stand-alone, full title.
Echoing Crytek’s claims that Warhead would be optimized to run on cheaper PCs, the preview notes that the Windows Vista-exclusive DirectX 10 API won’t be required to engage the game’s highest levels of detail and visual effects.
As previously reported, the game focuses on new lead Psycho, one of Nomad’s teammates from the original Crysis. Not unlike Valve’s Half-Life expansion Opposing Force (PC), the events of Crysis Warhead run parallel to those of the first game, following Psycho on the other side of the island.
Warhead’s campaign is said to employ more free-roaming sandbox gameplay than its predecessor, clocking in at around eight to ten hours, and features dialogue written by BioShock scriptwriter Susanna O’Connor.
The preview goes on to suggest that the enemy AI has been improved in Warhead, better equipping foes in terms of organization and combat tactics. In terms of new additions to the game’s arsenal, at least two new weapons—including a grenade launcher and double submachine guns—have been added, as well as the new armored scout recon and hovercraft vehicles.
Likely to be Crytek’s final PC-exclusive effort, Crysis Warhead is slated to hit PCs this fall.
IGN Previews Crysis Warhead
June 25, 2008 - Consider the warhead, an object that is both explosive and incendiary. A warhead is about destruction, pure and simple. Recognizing that is one of the key things to understanding Crysis Warhead, a stand-alone follow-up to last year’s acclaimed first-person shooter Crysis. Keep in mind that this isn’t a direct continuation of Crysis; it’s not one of the trilogy hinted at by Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli. Instead, Warhead is an offshoot story that focuses on one of Crysis’ supporting characters. And since that character’s nickname happens to be Psycho, you could rightfully expect some crazy things to happen.
In many ways Warhead is a different game than Crysis. The easiest way to think of Warhead is that it is Crysis with the action ramped up to 11. This promises to be a much more muscular shooter, with no shortage of huge firefights and explosions. In fact, the original Crysis may come off as being a much more cerebral experience in comparison. That game was about cat-and-mouse in the jungle, whereas Warhead is going to be about blowing that jungle up.
Warhead is set during the timeline of its predecessor. You play as Sergeant Michael Psyches, aka Psycho, the British-accented commando who goes off on a mission midway through Crysis only to reappear at the end, standing atop the flight deck of the aircraft carrier with a captured alien war machine. What happened to Psycho and how he comes home with such an oversized trophy is going to be the story of Warhead in a campaign that the developers say will be about the length of Crysis’. And before you can ask, since this is a one-off from the core franchise, the designers say that Warhead will pack a fitting finale.
While Crysis has sold more than a million copies and garnered many awards and accolades, Yerli said that there’s was also plenty of room for improvement, and that Warhead will address quite a number of issues. “Some people had some concerns about the ending of the game and the linearity of some sections, or could it be a bit more scripted with the environment? We tried to make with Warhead something that is a bit more accessible and mainstream in that regards.”
The fact that Warhead is built around Psyches also helps with telling a better story. In Crysis you played the faceless protagonist, and everything that happened in the game occurred from a first-person perspective. In Warhead, the designers can shift to more standard third-person cutscenes that have Psyches in them. Plus, it also helps that Psyches is a very colorful character. “He’s kind of a rough diamond, an unpolished diamond,” noted senior game designer Bernd Diemer. “He’s the guy who likes to blow up stuff, he’s the guy who likes to the cut to the point very, very fast. He doesn’t have time for chit-chat or doubts.”
“You tell him to go over there and take out that pillbox, he goes at it with a butter knife or C4 or whatever he has. That’s kind of his characteristic, and that’s where the name Warhead comes from. That’s him, basically. He’s explosive, he’s aggressive, and we wanted the game to portray that in interesting ways.”
The designers gave us a view of one of early levels in the game, Ambush. Right off the bat it’s intense. VTOL transports are coming in to drop off Marines, the radio is full of chatter, and jet fighters are dropping bombs left and right. Think of the opening of the Crysis level Assault, but with that amount of energy sustained throughout. It’s all very loud and frantic, but this isn’t an attempt to make a linear-game like Call of Duty. Warhead still embraces the series’ philosophy of the nanosuit, the high-tech power suit that lets you alter your strategy and tactics on the fly. The battlefields are still large and open, and this gives you an incredible number of options when in a fight. You can stealth and hide to restore your health or ambush an opponent. Use strength to leap atop buildings and hit your enemy from above. Or you can use speed to zip from one location to another. “The core gameplay is still Veni, Vidi, Vici,” Yerli said, referring to the Latin term “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
Since Warhead takes place concurrent to Crysis, it’s not too surprising that you’ll see many of the same assets that you may have seen before, like tanks and helicopters. Still, Warhead will introduce some new vehicles and weapons. We noticed a new type of armored personnel carrier, as well as an advanced scout vehicle, which comes in several variants armed with different weapons. Then there’s a new submachine gun that can be dual wielded, doubling your firepower. There’s more, of course, but that’s all we caught a glimpse of in this early level.
Yerli and the others see Warhead as sort of a relaunch for the Crysis franchise. For one, Crytek’s programmers have spent the last year optimizing and tuning the engine to improve both performance and visuals. For example, Warhead will introduce a new particle system as well as a new global ambient lighting system that boosts the image quality “at almost no performance cost” according to Yerli. Some before-and-after shots show off the new level of detail now achievable, right down to being able to see the grain in a wood plank or pores in human skin. “This is being done in DirectX 9,” Yerli noted, which is good news for those who haven’t or are unwilling to upgrade to Windows Vista and DirectX 10. And that brings up Crytek’s second point, which is that the rest of the PC ecosystem has matured quite a bit since Crysis shipped last year. Since then, Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Vista, which improved performance for 3D applications, and graphics hardware companies such as Nvidia have improved their driver support, which is critical for a game like Crysis.
There’s also the fact that many gamers have upgraded their systems over the past year. The Crytek team wants to dispel the myth that Crysis or Warhead requires a high-end, expensive system to play. So they ran the Warhead demonstration on a $652 PC built with parts purchased online. Performance was astonishingly smooth and fluid even with a high level of graphical detail.
Then there’s the other issue that Crytek wants to deal with: piracy. Yerli noted that for every copy of Crysis sold there were as many as 20 copies that were pirated. It’s obviously a touchy issue with them, especially since quite a number of those pirating the game are willing to spend money to upgrade their machines. “I’m disappointed by the behavior of the gamers,” Yerli said. “I’m not disappointed by the people who support us. I know there are a lot of people who support us, and I’m grateful and I thank [them] for that. But there are 15 to 20 times more people who don’t care right now.”
To combat this, Crytek plans to strengthen copy protection in Warhead, but how it will do so remains murky for now. Yerli admitted that it’s a very difficult task. “If you want to have an anti-piracy mechanic, you have to spend a lot of time at the risk of incapability here and there. So you will annoy some people, but you will delay the amount of piracy. You will make 10 people angry for 1,000 more people who cannot copy… It’s a dangerous walk to walk because the 10 people who are upset, they will get loud about it. And this is where we have to be good about it, and it’s difficult.”
While Yerli and other Crytek representatives have been quoted over the past few months that the company is flirting with no longer making games exclusive to the PC, Warhead will remain a PC exclusive. Warhead may be the litmus test that determines Crytek’s future to developing PC-exclusive titles. “We’ll look at how Crysis Warhead does,” Yerli said.
Warhead is being developed by Crytek’s new Budapest studio, and the developers there are bringing a fresh perspective to the series. Studio head Kristoffer Waardahl told us that many on the team are veterans of Hungary’s real-time strategy development studios, which sounds like an odd skill to bring to making a first-person shooter, but it actually helps when developing the complex and scripted moments of the game. It also helps with improving the AI, and the developers promise better human AI and, more importantly, better alien AI.
Crytek has also learned a valuable lesson when it comes to developing games, as well. Yerli said that, due to delays, too much information came out for Crysis before it shipped. The long wait also built up huge expectations. Crytek is going to play Warhead closer to its chest, revealing a lot less than before. And there shouldn’t be any long wait this time, as Crysis Warhead is on track for shipping this fall.
A great post from a Crysis player
I just stumbled upon this post and I couldn’t agree with it more so I’m going to just copy and paste it here. Maybe someone from Crytek will stumble across it and relay the info the Warhead designers.
Electronic Arts and Crytek announced last week that Crysis: Warhead was on its way, exclusively, to the PC. While we’ll leave the questioning of the choice of a ‘parallel story’ for another day, we’re psyched about re-entering the tropical paradise seen in 2007’s hit FPS. Therefore we humbly present the top things we want to see from Crysis: Warhead.
We Want: A Fluid Storyline.
First off, if Crytek are going to go down the arguably lazy design option of a parallel story, we at least want it to make sense. It has to fit in flawlessly with Crysis’ narrative.
A sense of progression needs to be sustained, while at the same time making sure that it’s not a simple rehash.
We want to see unique set pieces, developments and genuinely interesting plot sections. If we don’t, then we’re essentially just paying for a redux version.
We Want: Not To Fight The Aliens Again.
Crytek admirably held its hands up and stated that Far Cry was a damn good game, until it spoiled the game with the mutants at the end.
We couldn’t agree more, hailing the statement as both an apology and a promise; one showing regret and rebirth.
Lo and behold our respect was thrown out the window when Crysis introduced the aliens. Yes, they could fly and showed some fancy anti-gravity physics, but they were repetitive, boring and borderline game-breaking. Drab, poor AI and lacking in any interest, we’re hoping (most likely in vain) that they’ve been buried.
We Want: Gravity.
Working along the same lines as the above, gravity is an important part of gameplay. Yes, Portal manages to pleasantly confuse you, as did Prey. Dead Space, EA’s upcoming survival horror seems to be utilising a lack of gravity to startling effect.
Crytek failed. Dreary corridors with nothing to do are not fun. Shiny crystal effects do not equal a fulfilling game experience.
It made it difficult to kill the enemy ethereal spirits and dropped the game a few points. We saw the space-ship and that was enough. This time around, we want our feet firmly on the floor.
We Want: Artificial Intelligence.
Look at the pretty graphics! Look at that car explode! Look how we can turn invisible by simply ducking behind a box.
Delta difficulty proved the easiest for Crysis, despite supposedly being the hardest. We enjoyed the enemies talking in Korean and for some odd reason; it was easier to kill them. What we didn’t like was the idiocy of your opponents.
We’ll ignore the nanosuit’s camouflage feature and focus on how dropping behind a box equalled ‘caution mode.’ The soldiers shooting at you would stop shooting and start searching for you. It spoiled the immersion and brought us back to reality.
We want the AI to flush us out, pin us down. Who cares if it’s difficult, we need a challenge on the hardest levels.
We Want: Stability.
This is quite possibly the most obvious of our choices. There’s no point having hyper-realistic graphical effects, DirectX 10 lovelies and shimmering water when nothing short of Stephen Hawking’s brain can run it.
Crysis does look nice on medium graphics, but nothing comparable to the virtual sex it could have been. We want a fully optimised engine without the crashes, low FPS or bugs.
It’s got to be done right, for the sake of PC bragging rights. Improvement to the destruction won’t go missed either. Let us decimate everything in a hail of fiery justice.
We Want: Animals.
We’re sure turtle-AI is up there in the design process, but that wasn’t enough. When staring out across the sea, listening to the soft sounds of Korean screams, we want to be able to spot fish, birds, insects, crocodiles, elephants, dinosaurs!
This is a tropical paradise and we were disappointed that all there was to throw was the odd turtle. As much as we love punching the hard-shelled creatures, it wasn’t enough.
We want to punch every tropical creature out there! Crysis: Warhead needs to be a living island, giving us something to admire apart from tree-tree-tree-bush-tree. It needs to provide us with something to do between each encampment. Howler Monkey-shooting anyone?
We Want: Go Go Gadget Helicopter.
As much as we all yearn for a new nanosuit powers, we’re sure it isn’t going to happen. After all, this is a parallel story, which often means a copy and paste affair. The hope that we’ll be hearing the words ‘seduction ray engaged’ has all but faded (Why would you want to seduce Korean soldiers … or was it the turtles you were thinking of? – Ed ).
We are expecting an identical suit with identical powers, because varying the gameplay might be ‘unexpected’. Why can’t the nanosuit be Terminator 2-esque and let us liquefy, clone the appearance of a soldier and walk in undetected.
That would be a better example of the adaptive camouflage system used in the original, which was blatantly ripped from the first Metal Gear anyway.
At the same time, we’d love to be able to sprout propellers from our head, and fly about, saving a lot of repetitive walking. That’s our subtle hint of asking for a controllable helicopter, which isn’t a long shot considering there’s a section in the controls.
We Want: A couple of extras.
The key point about Warhead is whether we get completely new sections to explore. We don’t want to play anything we’ve played before; otherwise we’d stick with the original Crysis.
We want new weapon options, new weapons and more vehicles. We don’t want the same sections with the same weapons. It’s got to be fresh, not a rehash with a single twist.
Marco Fiori
Please Crytek, no alien or robot enemies in Warhead!
Maybe it’s just me but the last stretch of Crysis was a big let down. I don’t mind fighting a few robot/aliens here and there but after a while I got kind of bored with it. If you’re going to make me fight aliens the least you could do is make them bleed or have some sort of organic feel to them. I actually got to the end of the game and didn’t even have the will to finish. The part at the end where you have to battle like 6 mini aliens that are flying around, sucked. The few friends that also played it agreed. Again, this could just be a feeling between my friends and I, or maybe more people feel the same way.
I hope Warhead has some human enemies, or at the very least some organic enemies that breath, eat, and bleed. The first half of Crysis where you’re fighting enemies wasn’t too bad really. Well the gameplay kind of sucked. The guns didn’t seem to aim right and it took like 500 hits to drop an enemy. Plus the only way to stay alive was to sneak around all the time, that gets old pretty fast. I’d like to see something like a mix of COD4 and Crysis.
