Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli has said that a new console cycle won’t help the competition keep up with his team’s graphical prowess.

“I don’t think Crytek can do more on current generation consoles than Crysis 3. I actually think people will be astonished that next gen launch titles from other companies might not be much different from Crysis 3,” Yerli told CVG.

If more than an idle boast, Yerli’s comment is a little disheartening; the best thing about new consoles is the way it inspires developers to push the graphic envelope a bit further, something our late-cycle gaming PCs can usually handle with ease. But the not-so-modest executive apparently has us covered, noting that Crytek’s own efforts in that area won’t disappoint.

“Crytek’s projects generally will be way above what we’ve achieved on the existing consoles,” he said.

Although Crysis 2 wasn’t the graphical powerhouse we’d hoped for, the original Crysis inspired a wave of hardware upgrades with its astoundingly demanding requirements and set a benchmark for visuals. Crysis 3 is supposed to be a return to form.

Source: CVG

If you weren’t already aware for some reason that Crysis 3 releases on the 19th of this month, then, well… there’s probably no hope for you. I’m sorry. But for the rest of you, Crytek’s latest rig-melting outing is set to launch in a mere 11 days, and EA are releasing trailer after trailer to remind you of the fact. This latest one is set to the tunes of Muse’s “Liquid State” from their new album, too — so if you like both those things, then this is the trailer for you.

Not to be outdone by NVIDIA’s offering, rivals AMD have announced the release of their own beta drivers, improving performance for Crysis 3 players.

The new 13.2 beta drivers offer 15% improvements to MSAA in Crysis 3, as well as significant improvements in Skyrim, Borderlands 2, Guild Wars 2, DmC Devil May Cry and Crysis 2. It also resolves texture-flickering in some DirectX 9.0c applications.

You can download the drivers right here from our file library. Enjoy!

One of our community members has spotted that the EULA for the Crysis 3 beta test contains a passage identical to the one in the EULA for the SimCity beta, specifically the one which allows EA to ban you from all their games if you fail to report a bug.

SimCity‘s EULA has since been changed, but the one in Crysis 3 remains the same. Speaking on Twitter, Crytek confirmed that it was released as part of the beta before the EULA was changed for SimCity.

“It was baked into the Beta before we realized it had the ‘Bug Ban’ clause. We aren’t enforcing that,” wrote Crytek on Twitter, before adding, “We’ll be releasing a blog post about that soon, but for now rest assured we aren’t banning players for finding bugs.”

Source: Thanks PalZer0 and Mythor

If you wander over to the ‘Demos’ section of your the store in your Origin client, you’ll find a nice surprise waiting for you: the Crysis 3 beta.

It’s a 3.3 GB download, so fire it up once you get it and hop onto our very own games.on.net Crysis 3 servers, running both Hunter Mode and Crash Site games for your pleasure.

See you in game!

The open beta test for Crysis 3 will kick off later today, and games.on.net is doing our part by booting up our multiplayer servers so that you’ll have a solid Australian presence to kick ass and take names on.

But what can you do to prepare? Well, NVIDIA owners can grab the latest drivers for their cards, with the company promising that these 313.95 beta drivers can improve performance in Crytek’s latest rig-melter by 35%.

“Other highlights include sizeable SLI and single-GPU performance gains of up to 27% in Assassin’s Creed III, 19% in Civilization V, 14% in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, 14% in DiRT 3, 11% in Just Cause 2, 10% in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, 10% in F1 2012, and 10% in Far Cry 3,” claims NVIDIA in their announcement.

“Rounding out the release is a SLI profile for the newly released DmC: Devil May Cry, and an updated profile for the free-to-play, third-person co-op shooter, Warframe.”

We’ve uploaded these new drivers to our file library to save you the quota: grab the 64-bit Windows ones here and the 32-bit Windows ones here.

Source: Thanks, PalZer0!

January 29 will be the day that the Crysis 3 multiplayer beta opens to all, announced EA today. It will run for two weeks on all platforms, and feature two different modes and two different maps.

Hunter mode means that two players spawn as permanently-cloaked aliens, with the other players spawning as vanilla human troopers waiting for extraction. Each time an alien kills, the trooper respawns as an alien to join in the hunt — if any humans are left alive at the end of the countdown, the humans win.

Meanwhile Crash Site mode, which will be familiar to alpha players, sees alien pods randomly landing across the map which must be captured to earn points. The pods can be ripped apart and used as weaponry or simply lobbed at people with super strength as a high-speed bludgeoning device (spoiler: this rules).

As with the alpha, games.on.net will have servers up and running — so mark the 29th in your calendars, and get ready!

We recently spoke to Crytek, where they claimed they won’t be held back by inferior console hardware this time around.

This is my weapon. She weighs 150 kilograms and fires $200 custom-tooled cartridges at 10,000 rounds per minute. It costs $400,000 to fire this weapon for twelve seconds. Ahah — oh, sorry, wrong video. Where was I? Oh right! Crysis 3 has a gun called the Typhoon, and it fires 500 rounds a second. It’s no Sascha, but hey, it’s a start. And these aliens don’t like it at all. Not one bit.

Crysis 3 hits on February 19 — check out our massive PC gaming release list and see what you need to mark on your calendar.

Some silly fool’s gone and uploaded this Crysis 3 video in reverse! Well, we’ll watch it anyway I suppose. It is the third episode in a series called ‘The 7 Wonders of Crysis 3′ (bit of a humblebrag, there). This is a delightfully dramatic trailer, including but not limited to seeing a helicopter spiral back up into the sky and firing a missile that happens to land comfortably snugly in Prophet’s missile launcher.

I understand that it looks good and I understand what cause and effect are, but what I don’t get is what this trailer is really trying to say about Crysis 3. It’s fun to watch in any event, so you should go ahead and check it out below.

With Crysis 3 almost upon us, naturally Crytek are starting to think about the future — and surprisingly, they’re considering other genres beyond the FPS when it comes to the next Crysis title.

“I think the Crysis franchise itself has life left in it,” said Crytek’s Michael Elliot Read to Dusty Cartridge.

“Whether it’s in a different game type format or whether it’s expanding upon this, it’s hard to say. That’s going to be up to the designers at the end of the day. Crysis was always intended to be a trilogy, and I think that over that time we’ve built a really cool universe. We haven’t really gone in and said, ‘Hey, let’s put Nanosuits and clown suits and stuff and completely violate and sell our IP.’ We have a lot more life left in that to go back and try some unique stuff. Whether it’s FPS or not I have no idea, but there’s definitely a future in the franchise.”

We recently spoke to Michael about Crysis 3 also, where he claimed that Crytek weren’t going to let consoles hold them back any longer.

Source: Dusty Cartridge via PC Gamer

At the recent EA summer showcase, using the aid of his nanosuit’s cloaking mode, Bennett Ring snuck into the dressing room of Michael Elliot Read, Producer on Crysis 3. Unfortunately the cloak energy ran out just as Michael was taking his pants off, so to defuse this awkward moment Bennett quick-fired off a list of things he’s been wondering about EA’s upcoming sci-fi stealth blaster. The result was this interesting insight into Crysis 3’s approach to linearity, local matchmaking, hardware requirements and more, with not a peeping tom violation in sight.

The next in the ’7 Wonders of Crysis 3‘ video series, directed by The Book of Eli‘s Albert Hughes, has been released. This one shows Prophet stalking through the long grass and using his bow to deal with alien enemies, in a manner delightfully reminiscent of Jurassic Park: The Lost World‘s velociraptors in the long grass scene. Great movie, great movie. Here’s a video:

We actually just played this section for ourselves the other day — click here to read our hands-on impressions.